Title of recording: Oral History Interview with Margaret Carter, October
25, 1975. Interview A-0309-1. Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007)

Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (A-0309-1)

Author: Chandler Davidson

Title of transcript: Oral History Interview with Margaret Carter,
October 25, 1975. Interview A-0309-1. Southern Oral History Program
Collection (#4007)

Title of series: Series A. Southern Politics. Southern Oral History
Program Collection (A-0309-1)

Author: Margaret Carter

Description: 234 Mb

Description: 61 p.

Note:
Interview conducted on October 25, 1975, by Chandler
Davidson; recorded in Fort Worth, Texas.

Note:
Transcribed by Joe Jaros.

Note:
Forms part of: Southern Oral History Program Collection
(#4007): Series A. Southern Politics, Manuscripts Department, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Note:
Original transcript on deposit at the Southern
Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill.

Editorial practicesAn audio file with the interview complements this electronic edition.The text has been entered using double-keying and verified against the original.The text has been encoded using the recommendations for Level 4 of the TEI in
Libraries Guidelines.Original grammar and spelling have been preserved. All quotation marks, em dashes and ampersand have been transcribed as entity
references.All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as "All em dashes are encoded as —

[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

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[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

This is October 25, 1975. I am Chandler Davidson, Professor of Sociology
at Rice University, interviewing Mrs. Margaret Carter of Fort Worth,
Texas, long-time activist in statewide liberal politics. Mrs. Carter, I
would like to begin by probing into your early family history and
getting a little biographical information from you. Would you kind of
bring me up to date on your vital statistics? Where you were born and so
forth.

MARGARET CARTER:

I was born in Sherman, Texas, in 1909. My father was a city clerk in the
first city manager government in Texas, and my mother was a second
generation immigrant from England whose family had all been miners, and
my husband's family were also miners in the United States. They met in
Chicago and were married eleven years before she died. I and my sister
were brought up by my great-aunt and great-uncle. He had a business in
Sherman and my great-aunt had been a teacher in the first public schools
in Fort Worth after the Reconstruction.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What was her name?

MARGARET CARTER:

Lua Dial was her name and his name was Preston Drury Hollingsworth.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Did you say that Sherman had the first city manager government in
Texas?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That is surprising. I had always thought that that originated in
Galveston.

Page 2

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, maybe Galveston and Sherman both claimed to have been first and
perhaps neither knew that the other had that form of government. The
Hollingsworths were really the principal influence on my whole
youth.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And were they involved in politics?

MARGARET CARTER:

No.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When did you get interested in politics?

MARGARET CARTER:

After I married a lawyer.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When was that?

MARGARET CARTER:

May I tell you a little more?

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Yes.

MARGARET CARTER:

My great-aunt was one of the first graduates of the first normal school
at Huntsville. Before she was eligible to go to Huntsville, she went to
a private academy where she lived in the home of the principal and did
housework and sewing for his large family to make her expenses. That was
not because her father had never earned any money, but because her
family had invested what they had in Confederate currency as all the
loyal Texas families did at that time. She was born the year that the
Civil War began and she was a change of life child. I remember my
great-grandmother, Amanda Anderson Dial, who lived to be ninety-five
years old.

My great-grandfather, Benjamin Franklin Dial, was a general in the Army
of the Confederate States of America and they had lived in Marshall,
which was then an outpost of Anglo-American civilization. Many of their
old friends had lived in Marshall and I have had a pretty long jump to
make in my personal orientation. They told me that it was a shame that
Mr. Lincoln was assassinated. The South would have been better off if he
had lived, but they also told me that the Negroes would be much better
off if they stayed in their place and that part of it I didn't believe,
probably on account of my mother, whom I did know—I

Page 3

was ten years old when she died. Her older brother had become a Friends
minister, so I had some Quaker influence on her side and then I married
the youngest son of a miner who had had some experience with seeing his
male relatives belong to and take leadership in local unions at a time
when there was discord with management and activity required real
sacrifice and courage.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

This was a coal miner?

MARGARET CARTER:

A coal miner. In Thurber.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Where is Thurber?

MARGARET CARTER:

It is not far from Stephenville. My husband [Jack Carter] was actually
born in Stephenville because they had to go to Stephenville to get a
doctor. Thurber was a company town. There was a Thurber Coal Mine and a
Thurber Brick Company and that was all that was there. He grew up there
for, I suppose, the first ten years of his life. He moved to Fort Worth
a little before I did and when my family moved to Fort Worth, it was
coming back to Fort Worth. They lived in Fort Worth, then in Sherman
about twenty years and came back to Fort Worth when I was eleven. So, I
spent almost all of my life in which I did much thinking in Fort Worth.

We were quite active in the Baptist Church, which is where I met my
husband. He expected to become a Baptist minister until he went to
Baylor University and began to realize what was involved in being a
minister in the Southern Convention and decided that his outlook was
already too broad to permit him to have a successful career in the
Southern Convention. So, he took a long summer off, went to West Texas
and thought about it and decided that the thing he needed to do was to
become a lawyer instead. We were already engaged and when he came back
after that long exile, he said, "I'm going to become a lawyer," and I
had to decide whether I wanted to marry a minister or marry him. It
didn't take me long to decide that I wanted to

Page 4

marry
him, although that wasn't easy because it didn't occur to us then that
people got married before they were ready to support themselves and
sustain a home. That meant that he had another long period of
professional education ahead of him. After thinking it over for a few
days, I said, "Yes, I think that it is all right. I would still like to
marry you if you still want me. I wouldn't mind so much being married to
a lawyer as long as you don't go into politics." [Laughter] Then, he did go into politics. [Laughter] With my enthusiastic support and
after awhile, he became discouraged and I never have.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When were you married?

MARGARET CARTER:

In 1934.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And you were living in Fort Worth at the time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And had he earned his law degree by then?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh yes, he wasn't about to marry me until he had his Texas law
degree.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So you had a long courtship?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, yes we did.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

This was often the case.

MARGARET CARTER:

And then we waited a long time to start our family after that.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, after he became a lawyer, how long was it before you became actively
engaged in politics?

MARGARET CARTER:

Let's see . . . he became a lawyer in 1934 and by 1940, we had become
appalled at the way the local establishment abused the New Deal program.
They cursed it. They swore at it until they realized that they
themselves had to be rescued by it and then as soon as it had rescued
the

Page 5

banks and the biggest insurance companies and
the largest landowners, they wanted it to stop there. We didn't believe
that most of the people had lost confidence in the New Deal or lost
their enthusiasm for Roosevelt. So, in 1940, in cooperation with Maury
Maverick Sr., we organized our county convention for Roosevelt. We had
not organized the precinct convention. We just took the people that the
regular machine had sent to the county convention and turned them around
so that they sent delegates who would pledge continuing support of
Roosevelt without continuing support of Garner, who was vice president
at the time.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Had you been an enthusaistic supporter of Roosevelt from the
beginning?

MARGARET CARTER:

As soon as he had been elected, after the first hundred days, I was an
enthusiastic supporter of him.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You voted in the 1932 election?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, I did. That was my first presidential election, but you couldn't
tell from Roosevelt's campaign, the part of it that reached down to the
grassroots where I lived, that Roosevelt was going to do anything very
different from what Hoover had been doing.

Yes, because I tried voting outside the Democratic party once later and I
keep hearing about that time. I also voted for Republican John
Tower.1 He ran in a special
election, as you remember.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Yes, in 1961.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, against Blakley,2 who had just run
in the Democratic primary and been rejected. So, no one could say in the
special election that Blakley was running as a Democratic nominee and we
had no obligation as party members to vote for anyone in that special
election. Tower was the lesser of two evils, in my view. I thought that
a relatively impecunious teacher from Wichita Falls would be easier to
get rid of than a millionaire from Dallas. [Laughter] In that, of course, I was very clearly
mistaken.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Would you care to speculate on how many Texans could say truthfully that
they have voted both for John Tower and Norman Thomas?

MARGARET CARTER:

[Laughter] That would be interesting.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

To go back to that first election—I'm trying to put two and
two together here—at the time that you found out that your
husband was going to be a lawyer, you warned him not to get involved in
politics, and then in 1932, you voted for Norman Thomas. What happened
in the intervening time?

MARGARET CARTER:

I didn't marry my husband until 1934.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was there a period of several years there when you went from a relative
lack of political involvement in your early twenties to a time when you
became fairly aware and politically conscious in your early
thirties?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, but it was as a person on the sidelines. For one thing, I was a
teacher and I had begun to teach in high school and the thing that I was
most interested in was history and by that time, I had gone to graduate
school at

Page 7

Texas Christian University and the man who
was head of the history department was named Jack Hammond, who had also
been a successful reform candidate for mayor of Fort Worth. I suppose
that it was Dr. Hammond's campaign that first made us actively
interested. He was also a Disciples minister and he was appalled at the
conditions that leading citizens allowed to continue in the '30s. People
actually starved to death in the hotels and rooming houses on the
courthouse square, and the public hospital was so overcrowded that
people died lying out on the grass in front of the hospital. They
couldn't get in. And he went around preaching in as many churches as
would listen to him—and that was a good many—saying that no matter how
hard a time the rest of us were having, we were all in the same boat and
local government must do more about the poorest people. Both my husband
and I had been very poor. His father had died when he was three weeks
old. I was separated from my father by a family quarrel after my mother
died . . . we had both known extreme poverty and although we never
starved after we were married, we lived on an extremely limited income
and that didn't make us want to get over with the people that were safer
than we were. It made us feel a part of all the people who were as
insecure as we were. We felt that the New Deal leadership of the
Democratic Party was dedicated to taking practical steps to improve the
lot of the poorest people. My husband has been a poverty lawyer all his
life. No one told him that you couldn't make a living in poverty law,
and so he did.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And at the time you voted for Norman Thomas, was there much support at
all in a place like Fort Worth for a socialist candidate?

MARGARET CARTER:

No. As far as I know, no organized support. It was just something that I
did by myself. The only other influence that I can think

Page 8

of that moved me in that direction was that I majored in
English in college and became acquainted with the magazines that had the
best literary critics. Among them, of course, were The
Nation and The New Republic. I couldn't
afford to subscribe to The Nation or The
New Republic but I read them regularly in the Fort Worth
Library and before I knew it, I was getting out of the literary section
and into the political commentary.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, what I guess I'm getting around to was that this was more or less an
isolated person voting in secret for a socialist candidate. There were
no organized socialist clubs or anything like that?

MARGARET CARTER:

No. And I had no ideological interest in socialism. But I couldn't see a
dime's worth of difference between Hoover and Roosevelt as they made
their campaigns.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Have you ever known Carl Brannin in Dallas?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He was a pretty outspoken socialist, wasn't he?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. He was secretary of the Socialist Party in Texas for awhile.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And I believe that he also ran for governor on a socialist ticket in
1936?

MARGARET CARTER:

It may be, I don't remember.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Did you see Allred as a pretty strong leader of the New Deal? Was he
considered to be a liberal governor for his time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, he was.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And they still talk about him today as the only liberal governor of
Texas.

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, he was the only governor of outstanding ability after James Stephen
Hogg.

Page 9

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, at any rate, by 1940 you had become, you and your husband had become
involved to the extent that you began to try to engage in factional
politics within the Democratic Party at the convention level. How did
Maury Maverick3 get involved in this?
Was this in Fort Worth, or was this the state convention that you are
talking about?

MARGARET CARTER:

It was the state convention. Maury Maverick was in Congress at the time
and I suppose he was seeking people who would give Roosevelt the support
he needed. I've heard Maury Maverick talking about those conventions in
the '40s, but at the time, I don't really know how he found us because
we weren't anybody. He may not have met my husband until he arrived at
the state convention, delegates in tow. I didn't go to the convention;
our first child was born in 1940. I do know that after that, we began to
look into the machinery by which people expressed themselves through the
party. In 1944, my husband ran for county chairman and won.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Would you say that 1940 was really the first time that anything like a
liberal faction within the Democratic Party machinery began to develop
in a systematic way?

MARGARET CARTER:

In Fort Worth.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Had anything like that existed prior to 1940 in any other area of
Texas?

MARGARET CARTER:

Not that I know, but you know, I had a worm's eye view of the situation.
I didn't know.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

But you would put it then around '40 or '44? When really the cleavage
here between the liberal and conservative factions in state politics
developed?

MARGARET CARTER:

The 1940 state convention was wildly disordered. We think that we have
had disorderly and usually ill-managed conventions since then, but I
imagine that the 1940 convention was the most disorderly convention in
the history of Texas.

Page 10

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Could you describe that?

MARGARET CARTER:

I wasn't there, but I know that we finally allowed some of the
establishment people including the late, great Amon Carter, [unclear] publisher of the Fort
Worth Star-Telegram, to go on the list of delegates at-large
with one-fourth vote. It was possible then to divide the votes into
fractions as small as one-fourth. Of course, he didn't do it, he wasn't
going to cast only one-fourth vote, which was our purpose. [Laughter] But he was able to persuade a good
many of the people that we had elected to change sides by the time of
the state convention. The elected county chairman, who was of course,
looking toward the next election, had promised both factions that he
would vote with us and when the time came to vote, the sides were
exactly divided. It was necessary for the chairman, whose name was Mr.
Kaufman, to cast the deciding vote.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Kaufman?

MARGARET CARTER:

I think maybe it was Kaufman. As I said that, it didn't sound very right.
I remember him very well. He had a seizure in the aisle of the
convention and was carried off in an ambulance to the hospital.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You mean when it came time for him to cast the deciding vote?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, that's drama.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

By '44, we were able to develop a precinct organization and we carried
ninety-nine of the 116 precincts that were in the county and tied
one.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

"We" being the liberals?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. The establishment candidates . . . well, my husband was running his
own campaign. There was not really much of a well-organized liberal

Page 11

group yet.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

In other words, the vehicle for the liberal coalition in the election was
your husband's running for Democratic county chairman?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. This Mrs. James Farmer became a member of the executive committee
after that, the one who was the secretary of the suffrage group with the
office in the First Baptist Church.4
She had helped us. She had some experience in precinct work and there
was a rather unattractive man who was part of the old Populist
Party.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Who was that?

MARGARET CARTER:

His name was Claude Spratling.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And you mean the Populist Party around the turn of the century?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. He had a great deal of experience in doing precinct work. He had
lists of the people who had worked with their neighbors in the precinct.
But he was not a very personable man and he couldn't get people whom he
didn't already know to work with him in public. So he advised us behind
the scenes. He was a great help because we were very ignorant about the
precinct structure of the county. And he was outright radical in a good
many of his views but some of the other people from other states who
came in later and tried to work with him found that he was extremely
reactionary in race relations.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What were some of the issues that you can remember his being radical
about?

MARGARET CARTER:

He was an agrarian populist. He was radical on freight rate

Page 12

discrimination and the undue influence of banks on public
policy.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, really, these were the old Populist issues.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

But very conservative on race?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, on that same question, how did the people who were beginning to
form the core of the liberal group in Fort Worth feel on the racial
question? Or was this even a viable issue at that time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Not very, but by 1944 when my husband ran for county chairman, the
decision which required the Democrats to take whites . . .

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You mean the Smith v. Allwright decision?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, came down from the Supreme Court when I traveled in '45 and '46 for
the Young Democrats, which I did do, we ran into various opinions among
the county chairmen whether this Smith v. Allwright
decision would be followed, but we were already far ahead of the
community practice in that area. Of course, that was where my Quaker
background came in and my husband was just decent. The kind of people
who were found in his law office were of all colors because he had very
poor people for clients and he was uninfluential, he didn't know any
rich people. He didn't look at their color, he looked at their problem.
That was a very unusual thing and it cost him the possibility of
developing a middle-class clientele of whites. White people wouldn't sit
down in the same waiting room with a black person. So, we were already
ahead of community practice about race relations.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was he relatively unique so far as white lawyers went in this resepct in
Fort Worth? Were there very many?

MARGARET CARTER:

So far as I know. I am sure that there were some white lawyers

Page 13

who had occasional black clients, because there
were no black lawyers, in town, but they made it a back-door business.
They didn't invite their white clients into the same entrance as their
black clients and he just treated them the same and anyone who had a
good reason to need a lawyer, he helped.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And so in 1944, this was the same year that the Texas Regulars were
trying to unseat Roosevelt?

MARGARET CARTER:

That's true.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was that an issue in Fort Worth?

MARGARET CARTER:

It was the issue of the race for county chairman.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And was Amon Carter a Regular?

MARGARET CARTER:

I think that he tried to stay out of it personally, but most of his
friends were in it. There is a group of privileged people in Fort Worth
who are civilized, and although they are not about to encourage anybody
whom they consider radical or in any way unusual, they usually let
social climbers and some true believers, carry the burden of
prejudice.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was he in what you would call an old family, wealthy . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

No. He was an upstart from Bowie who was brought up without a father, as
my husband was, and who sold chicken and bread to the people who came
through on the railroad at Bowie. There was no railroad cafe at the
station in Bowie. So, his mother began to fry chicken and he took it
down to the train and he sold it through the windows to the people who
were hungry when the trains stopped there.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Is Bowie close to Fort Worth?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. And he had little formal education. Much later, a high school in
Fort Worth was named for him, And he wrote a rather pathetic letter
saying how

Page 14

much he appreciated having the high
school named for him since he had never had the privilege of graduating
from high school. He came to Fort Worth and married the daughter of a
very well-placed lumber man who [unclear] in
local politics. Her name was Nenetta Burton and she is still active in
Fort Worth, not so much in politics as in general charitable projects.
And it was her father's money and position that gave him his start. He
built on the fact that he came into possession of a newspaper. Of
course, he had to be a pretty good businessman to become a publisher of
a newspaper, which he was, at the time when the oil boom hit Fort Worth.
He was a boss who used economic power to get his way in politics, too.
He really had more interest in making sure that he controlled what went
on in City Hall than in anything else except national elections. He
wanted to be sure that he was the man that campaign managers of national
candidates came to in Fort Worth. He raised the money for national
candidates and not even the campaign managers knew from whom he got the
money. He had the checks made to him and then he put them in the bank
and wrote his check for the total amount that had been collected for
Fort Worth.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So he got the credit for it?

MARGARET CARTER:

He got the credit for it and there was nothing that Roosevelt could or
would do . . . he probably wouldn't want to do anything to find out who
were the dependable New Deal supporters in Fort Worth. I remember one
supporter who resented bitterly the fact that he raised more money for
the national ticket than Amon Carter did. Didn't raise it in Fort Worth,
he went to east Texas, the oil boom had moved from west Texas to east
Texas by that time and he raised the money in east Texas and in every
other way made himself as useful to the national leadership as Amon
Carter had. His name was Karl Crowley and he was very bitter because his
service didn't gain him any access to national leadership when they won
elections.

Page 15

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What sort of coercion did Carter have at his disposal to force the people
to channel their money through him?

MARGARET CARTER:

He was a very heavy-handed political boss. He was a benevolent despot,
but he was a despot and we are still suffering from the lack of
leadership that his period of leadership left us in.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What was that period?

MARGARET CARTER:

From 1920 to 1955.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That's a sizable chunk of years.

MARGARET CARTER:

He allowed no one of an age to be his children the opportunity to show
any leadership. The great mistake that my husband made, the reason that
he had no political career, he ran for public office twice, was that he
had the temerity to announce for public office without first consulting
Mr. Amon Carter about whether it was a good idea to run. To tell the
truth, he just didn't know that that was part of the procedure. [Laughter] He thought you went to the city
secretary or the county chairman and got a blank and filed.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And when did he find out that he had made a mistake?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, he was told after his application hit the newspaper. The newspaper
was Mr. Carter's eyes and ears.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was his the only major newspaper in Fort Worth at the time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, except the Scripps-Howard paper . . . I can't say exactly when it
came in, we had the Fort Worth Press most of the time
that I've lived in Fort Worth. It was a Scripps-Howard newspaper for
many years, but it was not long before the Fort Worth
Press began to follow the Star-Telegram's
editorial policy on everything, except national and international
issues.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, what happened then to your husband's career?

Page 16

In what way did Amon Carter influence it?

MARGARET CARTER:

He retired my husband. [Laughter] Without
even taking the trouble to do it personally. Dr. Hammond had great
difficulty on the city council. My husband had become a staunch admirer
of his and a staunch follower of whatever tactics Dr. Hammond decided to
use, which were sometimes rather dramatic and unconventional.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Would you say that he was a liberal?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, he was. He was a humanitarian.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was he rather unique in that respect, so far as Fort Worth councilmen
went?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. So, of course, we were labelled as Hammond people. There came a time
when the Star-Telegram had used its influence to
persuade enough members of the city council to resign one by one, that
there was no longer a quorum able to hold meetings and conduct business,
or it had almost reached that point. They kept bringing economic
pressure on Dr. Hammond, who was vulnerable to it. Dr. Hammond had run
against the chairman of the board of the university where he was a
member of the faculty, and beat him.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He was at TCU?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

A law professor, did you say?

MARGARET CARTER:

He was a history professor.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That doesn't fit my image of the usual timorous faculty member.

MARGARET CARTER:

He was approaching retirement age and he would have been unable to get
employment at another school had he been forced to resign from TCU. So,
he stayed as long as he could and he was convinced that he would be
fired at TCU unless he resigned as mayor. He wasn't mayor at first; it
was

Page 17

after two or three elections that he became
mayor.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was this a citywide election?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, it was.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And he ran on what, a rather humanitarian and enlightened platform?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. And he carried out the programs that he advanced, too.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And he was undoubtedly opposed by the Fort Worth press?

MARGARET CARTER:

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram all the way.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Were there any papers that supported him?

MARGARET CARTER:

No. Dr. Hammond reached the point where he needed to resign, which would
have left the city council without a quorum. They couldn't have held
meetings or conducted city business. The idea was to throw the city
government into complete anarchy, and he asked my husband if he would
accept that seat by appointment.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What year was that?

MARGARET CARTER:

I would have to check it. I think that it was '38. My husband accepted
the appointment.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

As mayor?

MARGARET CARTER:

No, the replacement would not be mayor then, he was a member of the
council. There had been a long series of recall movements. Dr. Hammond
had never succeeded in electing the whole city council but he had
succeeded in getting six of the nine members elected on a slate and then
several of them had turned against him. My husband had been chairman of
the recall movement to get petitions signed to remove these people who
had double-crossed Dr. Hammond. When my husband took the seat on the
council the very petitions that my husband had gotten signed against
other councilmen were also used in district court in a law suit to
unseat him. Not a single voter

Page 18

had ever signed a
petition to recall my husband.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You mean that they just used the same list of names?

MARGARET CARTER:

They just used the same list of names. And when they held a special
election to recall the people who had disappointed Dr. Hammond, they
also put my husband's seat up for grabs. He took them as far as he could
go in the courts to protest that illegal unseating and then when the
regular election came around, he ran for the seat and was defeated. This
was all before he ran for county chairman.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So again, this is pretty much the doing of Amon Carter?

MARGARET CARTER:

No, I wouldn't say that. Because it was a situation where practically all
the others interested in politics were sheep. Everybody who worked for a
major oil company or a utility company or a bank or for a large business
was automatically in the pocket of Mr. Carter. They were quite willing
followers. There was very little rough pressure brought, it was just
their finding out what the boss wanted them to do and that is what they
did.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

In other words, sort of a business class here which shared his values to
begin with.

MARGARET CARTER:

People who did not share similar benefits came to identify with more
privileged people even if they were not sharing the benefits which the
privileged wanted them to help protect.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Of course, this was a time too when the minorities, the blacks, were able
to vote in city elections?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, they were but the organization of black voters was quite venal.
There were a few precinct leaders who sold votes and after awhile, it
became evident that they were not delivering the votes they sold so they
sort of put themselves out of business. But black voters had no
significant

Page 19

effect on city elections at the
time.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

About what percentage of Fort Worth was black at that time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Perhaps fifteen percent.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Is that about the percentage today?

MARGARET CARTER:

It is somewhat larger, now.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was there a fairly sharp increase after the white primary decision?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, with the white primary decision, blacks became interested in at
least becoming Democratic precinct chairmen in the precincts they
dominated, because they didn't understand too much about, say, the
difference between Dr. Hammond and Mr. Jarvis, but they could
understand, because they could listen to the radio, the difference
between Roosevelt and his detractors, and they very much wanted to
support Roosevelt.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What was the reason for their not being able to clearly understand the
issues in city government?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, they could be confused much more easily when you had only one
newspaper and the newspaper also owned the local radio station, than on
national issues.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Does Fort Worth have nonpartisan municipal elections?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Do you think that had any influence on the tendency to be confused?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. It was only very occasionally that any slates of candidates ran for
city offices, so there were just individuals that they had to select and
that was beyond them. It wasn't just that there were several unsavory
characters in control, but that the ministers were pretty venal and they
were able to get some participation from their congregations, which
they

Page 20

controlled. They probably didn't
understand the issues either, or maybe we didn't understand the
issues.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

At this time, along with Amon Carter—he turns out to loom very large
here—were there other families who would be considered members of the
establishment at that time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. Raymond Buck was a very dependably loyal Democrat through the Texas
Regulars and the "no third term" movement, and it seems to me that those
movements to break the Democratic Party lasted for at least three
presidential elections. And Raymond Buck was the son of a district judge
and a very highly regarded lawyer himself who was aware that the New
Deal had saved the privileged class and that included himself, and he
once said to my husband, "I have not forgotten what made me a rich man
and I do not intend to turn my back on the Democratic Party." He never
did.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Are you referring here to the Jesse Jones Reconstruction Finance
Corporation?

And of course, Mr. Buck was Mr. Carter's right-hand man and although he
never crossed Mr. Carter, he had the sophistication to give Mr. Carter
detailed advice about how to get done what he wanted to get done.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

How about Anne Tandy and that group of wealthy ranching families who
lived in Fort Worth?

MARGARET CARTER:

To the best of my knowledge, they never took any direct active interest
in politics. Anne Burnett Tandy has always been a private person until
she married Mr. Tandy. Mary Sears, the former editor of the Star-Telegram's

Page 21

society section, was
inundated with information about parties in which she had little
interest. She never found it difficult to get copious, accurate
information about Mrs. Carter's parties, but Anne Burnett's social life
was a closely guarded secret. Most ordinary people were hardly aware of
the names of Anne Burnett's successive husbands. The Tandys were guests
at John Connally's party for President Nixon at Connally's ranch during
Nixon's campaign for reelection. The guest list for that affair was not
given to the press.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, really Amon Carter was Mr. Fort Worth.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And the two Carters had a falling out in the late thirties . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, they never had a falling out. [Laughter] My husband was just among the people that he didn't
have to notice.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He was never "in" so he couldn't very well fall out.

MARGARET CARTER:

He couldn't very well fall out. He did have some other partisan
experience, though.

After my husband became the county chairman in '44, he was too old to go
to the war, and of course, the younger men who might have been active in
politics were in the war in '44. And in '45, a young man from Georgia
came into Texas because he was part of the staff of the Democratic
National Party, to organize some Young Democrats. By that time, we had
elected a staunch New Dealer from Dallas, Mr. Harry Seay who was
president of the Southland Insurance Company, as state Democratic
chairman. And Bill Kittrell, who was Mr. Rayburn's man in Texas, was the
secretary of the state party when the national committee sent this young
staff member down to get Young Democratic clubs organized. Their
thinking was that they wanted to be able

Page 22

to receive
the veterans as they returned from the Second World War and to make sure
that young people stayed faithful to the Democratic Party. My husband
was able to help, and by December 1945 we had a good many Young
Democratic clubs formed. That was when I travelled for the Young
Democrats and my husband was elected president of the Young Democratic
Clubs of Texas. Jim Wright was elected national committeeman.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Jim Wright who is presently a congressman?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.And Bob Eckhardt6 was active in that
group and so was Stewart Long7 and so
was Chris Dixie8 and Bob Slagle . . .
well, Bob Slagle flaked in '46 and gave us trouble.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Bob Slagle?

MARGARET CARTER:

S-L-A-G-L-E. He was from Sherman and he was also at one point the
statewide manager of the Ralph Yarborough campaign. The first campaign
that Senator Yarborough won was run by Bob Slagle.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What do you mean when you say that he "flaked"?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, we knew that we had something, and we did have something. We had a
very good organization, a very lively organization and the establishmen
began to infiltrate it. And Slagle and Joe Kilgore9 were flaked by the time of the '46 convention.
[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Would you like to continue?

MARGARET CARTER:

I'm not sure where I was . . . I think that I was telling you about my
husband and the Young Democrats. After we had had a highly successful
convention in '45, that is, highly successful from the point of view of
people who were interested in issues, we got a great many of the
returned veterans into the organization and they were on fire about

Page 23

issues. They wanted to know "what did we mean
pretending that China didn't exist," or "why in the world weren't we
doing more about getting ethnic minorities interested in politics," and
all kinds of questions that our elders and betters didn't want brought
up. I was on the resolutions committee. We adopted a bloc of resolutions
which were much tamer as we adopted them than they were as they came
into the committee. [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You say that this is '46?

MARGARET CARTER:

'45. And Jim Wright was chairman of that resolutions committee. The
reason why it is rather fresh in my mind is because he is writing an
autobiography and . . .

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Jim Wright is?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, and he sent me a rough draft of a chapter for which he asked me to
check the exact dates of that state convention and if possible, to send
him a copy of the resolutions we adopted. I found it and xeroxed it for
him. So, I have just been over the resolutions and the eighteen-year-old
vote was one of them. There are several things which have been achieved
in the years between then and now. Some of them have not yet been
achieved but will be. By '46 of course, Bill Kittrell at least was
wishing that they had never seen the man from Georgia who started all
this. [Laughter] Of course, Mr. Kittrell had
to answer to Mr. Rayburn for any disturbing influences in Texas and when
we had an even more successful convention in '46, the national
committeeman, whose name was Myron Blalock, from Marshall, tried to buy
it with paper clubs. We didn't let him . . . our credentials committee
sat down and called all people whose names were listed as members and
said, "When did you join the Young Democratic club?" You know, it was
just paper organization in most instances.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You are suggesting at this point that the Young Democratic clubs

Page 24

in Texas were essentially a progressive network of
organizations?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. We were able to keep our statewide organization or network of only
bonafide clubs. They didn't have to all agree with each other, but they
did all have to be Young Democrats who were actually organized. That was
the point when Bob Slagle and Joe Kilgore rose up, after the credentials
report, and said that they were leaving us and they wanted their money
back. Chris Dixie rose and made a fiery, eloquent speech in which he
said with great dignity that there had been many reasons why Democrats
had had to bolt in the recent past and there might be other reasons why
it would be necessary to do so serious a thing as to bolt, but this was
the only occasion when people had bolted because they wanted their money
back. [Laughter] And he moved that the money
be returned to the persons who provided it and that money was never
claimed.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Who did Chris Dixie suspect had provided the money?

MARGARET CARTER:

Mr. Blalock.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

I see.

MARGARET CARTER:

So, in 1948 when Truman announced for president and the establishment in
Texas was not for him, he had no money with which to open a state
headquarters and Marion Storm was the secretary, my husband was then the
president. She was then in charge of a local liberal office which Mrs.
Cunningham had encouraged her to open back in 1944.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

This is Minnie Fisher Cunningham?

MARGARET CARTER:

Minnie Fisher Cunningham.10 Marion saw
my husband and said, "We still have this two thousand dollars in the
bank that nobody ever claimed from the '46 convention. Why don't we
contribute it to the Truman campaign and they will be able to open a
statewide headquarters?" So, that was what we did,

Page 25

because long before '48, Myron Blalock had persuaded the national
committee to lift our charter.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

On what grounds?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, they didn't have to have any grounds, as far as I know, there never
were any. Of course, he had not approved our organization in the first
place.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

To go back one step, you give the impression that Rayburn was not pleased
by the Young Democrats.

MARGARET CARTER:

Mr. Rayburn didn't mind our organizing in the first place, or Mr.
Kittrell wouldn't have encouraged us. You see, we thought that the
proper auspices were the secretary and chairman of the state Democratic
committee. We didn't even know Mr. Blalock and you know, we're not much
for looking up influential people. [Laughter]. We didn't see the need to, which I suppose we should
have. The first that we heard from Mr. Blalock was that Mr. Rayburn was
dissatisfied on account of the content of these resolutions.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

In other words, on account of these rather progressive resolutions?

MARGARET CARTER:

They didn't suit his friends over the state. And he was blamed for not
having ridden herd on us before we gave publicity to these wild ideas
like the eighteen-year-old vote.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, in various accounts of Rayburn's political career, he is often
described as a New Deal liberal, but what you seem to be suggesting here
is that at least by this point in his career, he was of a more
conservative view.

MARGARET CARTER:

No, Mr. Rayburn was involved in a dichotomy. He was one person in Texas
and another person in Washington. In Washington, he was Roosevelt's
faithful organizer of the majority in the House. Since he and Roosevelt
were elected and reelected in the same elections, on the same

Page 26

ticket, he felt that it was his duty to give the
president practical support and he did. Except, of course, the depletion
allowance could not be touched. He was there to see that the Texas oil
industry was not offended. But in Texas, he was the man who extracted
the checks from the millionaires. And everyone in Texas who disturbed
the sensibilities of the millionaires had to be repressed so that he
could get the credit for bringing substantial sums of money to the
national party and also be free to give the president practical support
of the kind that most ordinary voters don't understand.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So what happened when you incurred the ire of Rayburn?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well of course, in the process of taking the charter away from us they
did have the grace to organize a Young Democratic club. [Laughter] They organized rival clubs, a few,
which they recognized and as soon as they were recognized, they stopped
meeting.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, once the charter was revoked or once it was taken from your hands,
did the liberal control of the Young Democrat movement subside?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, yes. We were not even invited to the organizing meetings of this
other group. We don't even know whether they met to this day. They just
had newspaper stories saying that they met and there were frequently
stories in the Star-Telegram about meetings that were
said to have taken place when there had been no meetings.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And then did the Young Democratic movement in Texas kind of die out
through this period?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When did it get started back up?

MARGARET CARTER:

I'm afraid that I don't know, because we were at the top of the age group
then and you know, who cares what happens to a Young Democrat except
another Young Democrat? [Laughter]
Furthermore, we were grown people

Page 27

and my husband
was already a county chairman then and when he learned what a vigorous
and well-financed campaign—illegally financed, incidentally,
as there was a ceiling of $125 on the amount that a party chairman could
spend on his campaign—he decided that he would run for a
public office rather than for reelection as county chairman. He ran for
the state senate and was defeated for that. That was in '46. By that
time, we were involved in the Rainey situation, which was how we became
most closely associated with Minnie Fisher Cunningham, although she had
been active in the '44 state convention. The office at 711 Littlefield
Building, which she was instrumental in opening, had been continuously
open since '44.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, you are speaking here when you say the Rainey affair, you're
talking about President Homer Rainey who was fired by the board of
regents at the University of Texas. Could you describe a little bit
about how the Rainey bid for the governorship, the entire Rainey affair
there, served as a focus for liberal organizing energies at that
period?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. If you want to know where I knew Rainey, he was the youth director
for the Baptist church that I attended as a little girl in Sherman. He
went to Austin College and his wife taught in the high school that was a
block from our house. He left Texas soon after he graduated and went
into religious education rather than the ministry. At the time that he
was youth director of our church, he was a ministerial student and it
was a long time before he came back to Texas as the president of the
University of Texas. When we were organizing the Young Democrats, many
people thought and some were candid enough to say that they thought we
were only organizing the Rainey campaign for governor. You may not
remember, I don't know whether you were here then, that after he was
fired—and of course, he

Page 28

realized fully
that the course he was following for at least a year before he was fired
was leading to that—he became a regular radio commentator
with the support of a man who had invented a power mower, Jacques was
his name, from Denison, which was just ten miles from Sherman. Mr.
Jacques had made a good deal of money with this invention. He was a good
mechanic and he had had enough good business advice after inventing
something good that he did reap the profit himself. He was embarrassed
because he couldn't find enough things to spend his tithe on and there
was a Baptist minister named Blake Smith who was pastor of the
University Baptist Church and Homer Rainey belonged to the University
Baptist Church.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

In Austin?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, in Austin.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He was a rather liberal minister, too, wasn't he?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, he was.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

I don't believe that he was a Southern Baptist, was he?

MARGARET CARTER:

I'm not sure of that, but he was nonabrasive and quite dependable in a
controversial situation. He persuaded Mr. Jacques that the Lord wanted
him to use the rest of his tithe to subsidize Homer Rainey in a series
of radio programs. I heard Dr. Rainey say once that now that the regents
had fired him from the University of Texas, his classroom was the state
of Texas. [Laughter] They were excellent
radio broadcasts.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Why was Rainey fired, incidentally, by the regents?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh . . .do you really want to go into that? [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, if you could just briefly . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

For protecting the rights of his teachers to academic freedom, for one
thing, and for insisting that the University of Texas Medical School

Page 29

should attempt to train as many doctors as Texas
needed and . . .

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Wasn't there an academic freedom case involved with some English
professor who was teaching John Dos Passos in the classroom and people
were . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

That was an excuse, it was not the reason, really. Because those Dos
Passos books which were made the campaign issue, although I'm sure they
were really an issue at the time that he was fired, were on optional
reading lists for a sophomore course. No one was required to read Dos
Passos.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, what was the key academic freedom issue, then?

MARGARET CARTER:

It was a matter of the faculty members excercising their rights as
citizens. During the war, there were three young teachers who did not
have tenure, they were not professors, who had gone to a meeting that
was being held by . . . I'm not sure which business group, but whichever
group it was, it was misrepresenting . . .

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

MARGARET CARTER:

I knew the name of one of those instructors. His name was Peach, I don't
remember the names of the other two. Large newspaper advertisements,
sometimes full page, were being bought . . . I think that it was the
National Association of Manufacturers, by one of the business groups and
the advertisements completely misrepresented the impact of the federal
forty-hour week law on the war effort. They said that our soldiers were
out there facing the enemy without enough bullets and people back here
in the war plants were not being allowed to work more than forty hours a
week. Well, that was a lie. After they had worked forty hours a week,
they had to be paid overtime. These three young men had gone very

Page 30

quietly to a mass meeting called by this rabble
rouser for the business group and asked for a brief time to explain his
misunderstanding of the forty-hour week, of the provisions of the
forty-hour week law. He had immediately set out to get them fired at the
University. The AAUP investigated that case and as I remember, Dr.
Rainey was not able to protect their jobs because they didn't have
tenure, but he took their side.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And it was the regents who insisted on their being fired?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. I can't remember the details, but that was the power arrangement.
One of the first things that happened after Dr. Rainey became president
was that Professor Clarence Ayers, who was a professor, he was the head
of the economics department . . . well, I'm not sure he was the head,
but he was a tenured professor in the economics department, was making a
routine speech at one of the businessmen's luncheons, I think that it
was the Rotary Club, and W. Lee O'Daniel was the governor of Texas.
O'Daniel was plugging his sales tax on every radio program. He was, of
course, on the radio very frequently because he wanted to go to the
Senate. He had promised that he would not seek any other office than the
governor's office until he had brought this money in to pay the old
folks' pensions and every effort was being made to get a general sales
tax passed by the legislature, which was resisting vigorously. At the
end of the program, one of the members of the club asked Dr. Ayers what
were the provisions of this sales tax bill which was causing so much
controversy.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

The members of which club, now?

MARGARET CARTER:

I think that it was the Rotary Club. It was a downtown businessmen's club
in Austin. He told them and there was a reporter there who put in the
paper the actual information that Dr. Ayers gave in answer

Page 31

to a question. And the lobbyist from the State of Texas
Chamber of Commerce immediately demanded in print an investigation by
the proper committee of the legislature of this information that this
"radical professor" was giving out in opposition to the governor's sales
tax program. But somebody pulled his coattails before the next edition
of the paper and said, "For heaven's sakes, don't push for a legislative
investigation, Dr. Ayers will tell everybody in Texas what is in that
damn thing and that is the last thing that we want." [Laughter] Dr. Rainey had hardly gotten his
feet under the president's desk at the time and as soon as it was
apparent that there was a controversy, some reporter called him and
asked him what he thought. Well, he didn't know and he asked a few
questions about what had happened and as soon as he learned that Dr.
Ayers had been a guest at a club meeting and had answered a question
that was asked him, he said, "Did he answer it truthfully, were there
any inaccuracies in the statement?" He was told that there were none and
he said, "Well, he is a citizen of Austin and he was operating on his
own time and not representing the University and I don't believe that it
is any of my business." That sort of insensitivity to the interests of
the privileged was unheard of.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

On the part of the University of Texas president. You mentioned also that
he was for increasing the number of doctors that was produced by the
University of Texas medical school branch, and this was opposed by
whom?

MARGARET CARTER:

By the medical school. The faculty was against it.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And what was their purpose for opposing it?

Page 32

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, doctors then and I suppose that still doctors now, wanted the
number of doctors low enough to ensure that each licensed doctor would
have a chance for a good income and it didn't occur to them to look at
their problem from the potential patient's point of view. The excuse
that Dr. Rainey was given for resistance to his program for enlarging
the student body at the medical school was that in Galveston, there were
not enough opportunities for clinical experience for any larger
graduating class than was now being produced. He said, "Well then, we'll
need to move the medical school from Galveston, won't we?" [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, eventually he was fired and it became a cause celebre so far as the
liberals were concerned.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, and of course, the best people on the faculty left and it became a
cause celebre nationally.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So then he immediately ran for governor?

MARGARET CARTER:

That's right. And at the 1945 convention of the Young Democrats, he was
the principal speaker at one of our sessions. We were most of us, Rainey
supporters, but we had made every effort to gather in other Young
Democrats. We didn't know who were Rainey supporters when we went out
and looked for them to serve as Young Democratic organizers. I was the
one who did the looking.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He ran and he was unsuccessful and . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

But he was not unsuccessful. He only didn't get to be governor.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

In what way was he successful?

MARGARET CARTER:

In the process of running for governor, he was able to

Page 33

acquaint the population of the state of Texas with the basic issues
and before Beauford Jester could win the governorship in the primary, he
had adopted Rainey's program. Dr. Rainey led the whole field of thirteen
candidates and by the time the field had been reduced to him and Jester,
who had already, of course, won elective office in one statewide race
before, he came from the Railroad Commission to the governorship, the
whole state of Texas was familiar with Dr. Rainey's position on the
issues, and then in the runoff campaign, Jester took over every one of
Rainey's principal positions on issues. So, by the time that he was
elected, it was Rainey's program that people were expecting and they got
it, which was something that Rainey could not have accomplished had he
been elected governor. Because Rainey would not have had the cooperation
of the legislature. That was why my husband ran for the senate.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He ran for the state senate?

MARGARET CARTER:

He ran for the state senate. He said that if by some quirk, Homer Rainey
should get the governorship, he would need somebody in the state senate
who could help him. Of course, the Lord didn't intend for Rainey to be
governor of Texas and He didn't intend for my husband to be in the state
senate, either. [Laughter] So, that was
that.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So then . . . well, would you say that this also had the effect of
revivifying or at least giving a boost to the liberal movement at that
time?

MARGARET CARTER:

No, it had a bad effect on the liberal movement. There were not many
people who were perceptive enough to understand how much Dr. Rainey had
contributed. What they saw was that he had to leave the state

Page 34

to get another job and we were in difficulty at
that point. That state senate election, though, persuaded us that it was
foolish for my husband ever to run for office again and at the local
level, an issue was made of his membership in the NAACP.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

How long did he belong to that?

MARGARET CARTER:

As long as there had been a chapter. We had been charter members and
helped to organize it.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When was that?

MARGARET CARTER:

I'm not sure when that was. It was probably '44.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

The year that the white primary was outlawed.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. The NAACP didn't amount to much, heaven knows, but . . .

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Were there very many white members in it?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. I suppose there were about as many white members as there were
blacks, because the blacks didn't know what it was about. There were
more white members who understood the purpose of the organization and it
was a fully interracial organization at that time.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Were the blacks in it primarily professional people?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, a dentist became the first president of the NAACP and he retained
the office for about twenty-five years.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, that would seem to suggest that there was . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

I didn't get to tell you what my husband had to do with that. When he ran
for the senate, his opponent's supporters began to tell everyone that he
was a member of the NAACP and . . .

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And that probably cost him quite a few votes.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. There was no way that he could have won, but that was another thing
that cost him votes and a dear soul who was president

Page 35

of the Woman's Democratic Club at the time said after he was
defeated, "It was unfortunate that Mr. Carter was a member of the
NAACP." I said, "Mrs. Douglas, it is not a misfortune to be a member of
the NAACP." [Laughter] But we realized that
with our position on race relations well-known and far ahead of the
majority of voters, we would never win an election.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, he just really gave up the idea of . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

Running for office. But my husband became a member of the state
Democratic committee after that.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When was that?

MARGARET CARTER:

1948.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And how long was he a member of that?

MARGARET CARTER:

One term.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

How many liberals would you estimate were on the committee at that
time?

MARGARET CARTER:

It was the committee that had a majority of liberals, I think the only
one in the history of Texas.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Is that right?

MARGARET CARTER:

Stuart Long was a member of that committee and Lillian Collier.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Lillian Collier?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And Stuart Long of Austin?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What accounts for that, why were they able to control the committee at
that time?

Page 36

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, the people who hedged their bets all expected Truman to lose and it
was only the Democrats who were Democrats-win-or-lose who were active in
the Truman campaign. So, we controlled the convention.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Wasn't it the case in 1948 that there was at least some split among the
liberals, between the Wallaceites and the Truman people?

MARGARET CARTER:

Wallace in '48?

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

The Progressive . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, Henry Wallace.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Yes, Henry Wallace.

MARGARET CARTER:

The Progressive Party. It didn't amount to much in Texas.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Is that right? Were very many of the prominent liberals identified with
the Wallace effort?

MARGARET CARTER:

No. I was in Austin, in Gregory Gymnasium on the night in 1947 when
Wallace intimated, although he didn't formally announce, that he would
be a candidate for the presidency on an independent ticket and I was
appalled. I don't remember that there were any of my friends who felt
any other way. We went from that very large meeting to . . . you see,
that was another end of the war meeting with a bunch of very progressive
veterans, students at the University. I don't remember how it was, but I
do remember that we went . . . oh yes, I do. It was because Marion Storm
had made the arrangements for that meeting and we went from that meeting
to a much smaller meeting in the penthouse of the Austin Hotel, which
was the newly fashionable hotel at the time, where Wallace was staying
and to wait for the time that his plane would leave. There was maybe two
hours between the time of the end of the meeting and the time that he
needed to go to the airport

Page 37

and John Henry
Faulk11 was there entertaining
Henry Wallace with a stand-up kind of lampoon of all the Texas leaders
in the national Congress. [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, John Henry then, was a Wallace supporter though, wasn't he?

MARGARET CARTER:

I don't really remember.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

I remember watching the television show a couple of weeks ago, although i
haven't read John Henry's book, but the right-wing people who got him
blacklisted said that he voted for the Communist candidate in 1948.
Well, the "Communist candidate" in 1948 was Henry Wallace, the Communist
Party supported Henry Wallace, and that was how he was slandered
there.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, I suppose you could say that. I met John Henry Faulk that night and
I don't remember what he did in the campaign. We ran the Truman
campaign. Nobody who was anybody wanted to have anything to do with it
and you know, that was the year that Allan Shivers, who was the
governor, persuaded the . . . no, I beg your pardon. In '48, everybody
just kept their hands off, everybody who had any influence, because they
didn't want to be caught associating with a loser.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, did that include some of the liberals, or were the liberals pretty
strongly out in force to back Truman?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, it was our definition of a liberal that he supported the Democratic
candidate. [Laughter] And of course, my
husband was a state committeeman. He had an obligation, which he took
very seriously, to organize for Truman and it embarrassed Mr. Blalock to
have to come to

Page 38

Fort Worth and associate with the
man whom he had gotten thrown out of the Young Democrats, as a state
committeeman, but he did it and we associated with him. Then, he put Mr.
Buck in charge of raising money for the campaign and made my husband the
chairman of the Truman-Barkley Club, which was supposed to round up
smaller donations and make the little people feel a part of it.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Now, what was Mr. Blalock's position at this time?

MARGARET CARTER:

He was national committeman for Texas.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

I see. And what role did Sam Rayburn play insofar as Texas went in that
campaign?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, Mr. Rayburn, of course, was loyal to the nominee and was happy to
receive whatever money Mr. Buck could raise from our county.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, it was largely then, the labor of the liberals, at least at the
grassroots level, which accounted for . . .

MARGARET CARTER:

That was all there was. They said that Mr. Amon Carter placed a bet . . .
now Mr. Amon Carter made a substantial contribution to Truman and then
he placed a bet with Jimmy the Greek with the odds ten to one in favor
of Dewey. So, by making a hundred dollar bet, he got a thousand dollars
back and that was all he had given to Truman. It cost him nothing to be
known as a staunch Truman supporter. [Laughter] And he did nothing but write a check.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

He wasn't stupid, was he?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, no. [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You mentioned just a moment ago when we were talking, about Truman's
turncoat role in 1952. Could you elaborate on that? I'm sorry, not
Truman, but Shivers. His role in the 1952 election.

Page 39

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, by 1952, Shivers was in a position . . . you see, the liberals had
come into some influence in the state party in presidential elections
because that's when the ordinary people are interested enough to turn
out. And then we go out of influential
positions in the convention two years after that when nobody but the
regulars are interested in the convention. So, this liberal state
committee in '48 had gone out and had been succeeded by a very
establishment-oriented state committee in '50. Well, it was no trouble
at all for Shivers to persuade the '52 convention that had been arranged
by that committee elected in '50 to take the entire machinery of the
official Democratic party in Texas into the Eisenhower campaign, which
he did do. Well, that left Mr. Rayburn without the semblance of a party
structure through which to operate the '52 campaign. He came to Dallas
and set up a party headquarters in the Adolphus Hotel and personally
managed it, the '52 Stevenson campaign. Well, he had the grace to be
somewhat embarrassed about having to come to Jack Carter in Tarrant
County, and by that time, we had elected a railway clerk who was a
dependable Democrat, [unclear]. So, Mr. Ward
was technically in charge of that campaign, but Mr. Ward was
inaccessible during working hours, and while he was as helpful as he
could be, it was Mr. Carter who was really in charge of the campaign,
Mr. Rayburn was very embarrassed at one point when he promised us a good
deal of literature, we hadn't raised enough money to make any difference
and he said that if Mr. Ward would come over to the Adolphus Hotel, he
had a good deal of literature that he would give us. And Mr. Ward
couldn't go, so Mr. Carter went

Page 40

and Mr. Rayburn was
frustrated at having to deal with Mr. Carter. But we got the
literature.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What did Mr. Rayburn say?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, I don't know that he said anything. [Laughter] But it was obvious that he hadn't expected to see Mr.
Carter. Of course, that was also funny because back in '48, when my
husband was elected to the state committee, it was after a credentials
contest and the Dixiecrats, who were thrown out of the '48 convention,
state convention, by a vote of the convention, took us to court and said
that their civil rights had been violated and quoted the federal civil
rights statute under which no suit had ever been filed in Texas at the
time. But they filed their suit in the state court, to remove my husband
and his committeewoman from their seats on the state executive
committee. But during the campaign, Truman came to Texas in September of
'48—during the campaign, my husband was a committeeman. So, when Truman
came to Fort Worth, my husband had to be invited to be in the receiving
line. Of course, Mr. Amon Carter and Mr. Raymond Buck were in charge of
the arrangements for the president's visit. Which was quite all right
with us, we didn't have any facilities for planning presidential visits.
But Mr. Amon Carter had to treat Mr. Jack Carter as if he were a
personal friend and it was not easy for him. Soon thereafter, my husband
was forbidden by injunction issued in the district court to perform any
of the duties of the state committee.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

On what grounds?

MARGARET CARTER:

That there was question about whether he was the proper person to be the
state committeeman.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

As a result of this suit . . . ?

Page 41

MARGARET CARTER:

No, as a result of the credentials contest in the convention.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Oh, I see. OK.

MARGARET CARTER:

And as long as that litigation was pending, said the district judge,
there would be no state committeeman. That was all right, we didn't care
what the title was. Mr. Blalock had already been to Fort Worth and
appointed my husband president of something he called a club and so my
husband went differentially to the district judge and said, "I
understand that I cannot perform the duties of a state committeeman.
Would it be a violation of your order if I served as the chairman of the
Truman-Barkley Club, which the national committeeman has asked me to
do?" Well, the district judge said, "Jack, you know better than to ask
me a question like that. You do what you think that you ought to do and
then I'll tell you whether it was the right thing." [Laughter] So, he went right ahead and served and Judge
Morris never had anything to say about it.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Of course, that was the same year that Lyndon Johnson was elected to the
Senate.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, it was. And my husband was on the state committee that was sued by
Coke Stevenson12 over the
certification of the returns.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was effort put forward by the liberals who were backing Truman at that
time to back Johnson?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

In other words, he was perceived as a pretty straightforward liberal
candidate in that context?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, don't go too far. [Laughter] But we
supported him.

Page 42

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, what I'm trying to get at is at that time, did he appear to be more
liberal than some people came to believe perhaps than he was later
on?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, he was a useful member of the Texas congressional delegation. He
had been in the House and he had a pretty good record as Texas
congressmen's records go. We certainly didn't want to see Coke Stevenson
in the Senate. He had been the governor during part of the struggle over
whether people who intended to oppose the national nominees had a right
to control the state machinery. That was what all this Dixiecrat "No
Third Term" Texas Regular squabble was about and Coke Stevenson had
stood aside and said, "You never drink coffee from the boiling pot and I
have friends on both sides."

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

This was at the time that he was governor?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. In the forties. So, we knew that we didn't want Stevenson to go to
Washington and furthermore, when Rainey's situation developed, Stevenson
had been the governor when Rainey was fired and he had made no effort to
influence the regents. So, we had that against Stevenson, too. Of
course, Stevenson very much wanted to run for reelection, but come '46
when the powers that be saw that they weren't going to be able to
guarantee Stevenson's reelection, they supported Jester for governor and
Stevenson was promised that if he would support Jester for governor, the
same people who were supporting Jester for governor would support him
for the next Senate race. They tried to deliver and they just couldn't
quite do it.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And that was known by the liberals at the time?

MARGARET CARTER:

Oh, yes. From the establishment's point of view, Johnson was an upstart
who was trying to get promoted to the Senate when

Page 43

it wasn't his turn. We were always for upstarts. [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Still are, aren't you?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

How is the time going? Do you still feel like talking more?

MARGARET CARTER:

It's 5:30, isn't it?

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Yes. I still feel like asking questions if you are up to it. Would you
like to take a little break, perhaps? Well, in the 1950s the liberals
began to get what I guess you would call rather ambivalent feelings
about Johnson. What was the source of those feelings?

MARGARET CARTER:

I never was too much disturbed about Johnson until he began to lean
heavily on John Connally's advice. You know, Johnson lost his first try
for the Senate. John Connally tried to make everybody forget that, but
we remembered it and we had been for Johnson then.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That was when, 1942?

MARGARET CARTER:

'41. It was a special election. Raymond Buck was for him then, too and
that was the first time that we knew him. He lost that one. Well, you
know how close he came to losing it in '48, but he had been to Fort
Worth and made an involved deal, the details of which I do not know, but
some of them became obvious later, with Amon Carter and Sid
Richardson.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Were Carter and Richardson close friends?

MARGARET CARTER:

Very, and Richardson was supposed then to be the richest individual in
the world. He was an East Texas boy who had made an oil fortune at the
same time that Carter was making one in oil and newspapers and several
other areas.

Page 44

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

At the time that this deal was made, was Connally Richardson's
lawyer?

MARGARET CARTER:

No. Connally was Johnson's secretary.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That's right. This is in '48?

MARGARET CARTER:

'48, well, before '48. Apparently, part of the deal was that Connally
would become an employee of Richardson and another part of the deal was
supposed to be that Amon Carter's access to Canadian newsprint would be
facilitated. I don't know just which agency of the federal government
had to do with that, but Amon Carter was having a hard time getting
enough paper to print his newspapers. That was part of the deal and I
don't know what else was part of it.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, who was able to make that available to him?

MARGARET CARTER:

I don't know, but I have heard that was part of the deal and I do know
that there was an acute newsprint shortage in this country at that time
and that was how John Connally happened to move to Fort Worth and get
into our hair. After John Connally began to be the fundraiser for
Johnson, the people whose arms he twisted for money brought pressure on
Johnson and that was the point at which Johnson began to look less than
useful to Texas liberals.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was John Connally perceived, at that point, back in the early fifties, as
the conservative that he is now known to be? Were his political views
fairly clearly known at that point?

MARGARET CARTER:

No.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

But the inference was drawn because he was Sid Richardson's

Page 45

lawyer and people knew how Sid Richardson saw things, it
was assumed that he was a conservative influence?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, but John Connally was not seeking publicity for his views.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And then, of course, we come to the 1952 election. What role did Johnson
and Rayburn and the liberals play?

MARGARET CARTER:

Rayburn tried very hard to carry Texas for the Democratic nominee. I
don't remember that Johnson was active in the campaign, but I'm sure
that he supported the nominee. Rayburn had to depend on the unions,
which at that time had liberal leadership. We had a very good
labor-liberal coalition going in our county by that time.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Who were some of the labor leaders?

MARGARET CARTER:

Paul Gray was one. He's in Austin, now, for the CWA and trying to
organize the municipal workers into the Communication Workers Union.
Don't ask me why. [Laughter] Ross Mathews
was perhaps the best one. He was one of the chairmen of our
labor-liberal coalition. He was the secretary of the largest machinists
union in the world, the largest machinists local in the world, at
General Dynamics, which was then called Convair, the plant where the
military airplanes were made. It was the largest single employer in
Tarrant County, as it has been for some years now. Ross was really
something. His political enemies got him defeated for reelection to his
union office. Then, A. J. Pittman was vice-chairman of the coalition and
he was the regional organizer for the packinghouse workers union and
somehow, the local establishment people got to the radical leadership of
the packinghouse workers union, because Pittman was elected in the
international convention and Ross was elected by the members of his
local.13 You can

Page 46

understand how they might have had enough local influence,
enough local entrees to manage to defeat Ross, but they also managed to
defeat Pitt. They took a radical approach to get him thrown out and a
very conservative approach for getting Ross thrown out and they were
both thrown out because they were officers of the labor-liberal
coalition.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Has anyone speculated as to how that was achieved?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, I know how it was achieved.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

How?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, they persuaded . . .in the first place, they wouldn't give Ross
credit for anything that he was doing or publicity to show that he was
making friends for the union at the same time that he was making
enemies. He was, of course, making enemies but they were the kinds of
enemies that union officials should be proud to have and he was making
many friends and strengthening their educational program with political
clout. Ross was a real grassroots organizer. He took members of his
union who were absolutely unsophisticated and inducted them into the
mysteries of a precinct campaign so that they began to control their
conventions and to become members of the county Democratic committee and
when they had been through the campaign where they were elected to the
county committee, they began to look around for public offices for which
they could run and we kept having to fill vacancies because everybody
that Ross turned into a party officer then turned around and ran for the
water district or the school board or even the city council of some
working man's suburb. He was doing an excellent grassroots political
education job, but it was easy to persuade malcontents . . .

Page 47

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Within his union?

MARGARET CARTER:

Within his union, that he was spending too much time on politics. This in
spite of the fact that he was also the best office manager of union
records within the United States and after he was defeated, as secretary
of that local, he went to the international headquarters of his union
and became assistant treasurer and was put in charge of a program of
educating other people how to keep their union records as well as he had
kept his. It was not true that there was a conflict between his duties
and his interests in politics.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, who do you speculate was involved here in getting the malcontents
in his union to actually overthrow him?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, we know about one effort. There was one young man who is still
active in Fort Worth labor circles and who worked at Convair at the
time, who circulated a disaffiliation petition among the members of the
machinists union there. There is another small union there that is not
affiliated with any international group, that has one or two departments
organized at Convair and these men, some of whom were affiliated with
another AFL-CIO international . . . I mean, they were influenced by
organizers for another AFL-CIO organization, were circulating a
disaffiliation petition and of course, you can't do that long without
being caught. Two of them were caught and were charged with disloyalty
to the union. They had what they called a trial and they were found
guilty and assessed a large fine. The hearing board was satisfied that
the large fine would amount to expulsion but they didn't want to expel
them formally, they felt sure that they would never pay the fine so they
would never have them on their hands again, they hoped.

Page 48

And this young man that I knew, I didn't know one of them but I knew the
other one, was the son of a [unclear] member
of the stockhandlers union. When my husband first came to Fort Worth,
the first winter, his mother and her seven children lived in a tent on
the north side of Fort Worth. North Fort Worth was at one time a
separate town from Fort Worth. It was an industrial suburb that included
the packinghouses. The people who worked in the packinghouses were
organized into unions, one of which was the stockhandlers union. And
this boy's father had been active in the stockhandlers union and had
been known as a stool pigeon for management since my husband could
remember. My husband was doing an Amon Carter among the stockhandlers
and selling them refreshments, because they worked for a cafe and he had
to start to work by the time he was twelve years old. And he knew from
hearing the men talk as he sold them sandwiches that no one trusted this
boy's father. And the father called Ross—the secretary's position is the
important office in that local, because it's a paid office—the secretary
of the local which the son had been trying to destroy and said, "I want
you to use your influence to get the amount of the fine reduced." Ross
said, "I'm not going to do it. He was trying to destroy my union and I
don't want him to ever be an active member of it again." The father
said, "Oh no, he wasn't trying to destroy your union, he was just trying
to destroy your political interests." [Laughter] So, we know about that effort and the man who
defeated Ross was a very ignorant man who probably meant well and really
thought that Ross was neglecting his duties. Then he tried to take up
the political action which Ross had

Page 49

to leave off.
He just didn't know how.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, Ross's influence was effectively destroyed.

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, he just had to leave Texas. He went right ahead, but he did it
somewhere else. [Laughter] And he was a vice
president of the international union when he retired. There was an
effort to get him into a business, which is another thing often done to
union leaders. Either they move them up into management or they try to
persuade them that they would like to be in business for themselves. He
was offered a job in business that would have made him very much his own
man and utilized his skills as an office manager, but he said, "I've sat
on one side of the table for too long, and I know which side I belong
on." He was a tool and die maker. He said, "I can always make a living
with my hands." He was a great man.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That's a moving story.

MARGARET CARTER:

And his motivation was, his inner motivation, that he was living on
borrowed time. He had contracted tuberculosis before there were the
cures for tuberculosis that there are now and had lived in a sanitarium
for about a year, expecting to die. While he was there, he began to read
practically everything in the library, which wasn't very much, except
they had some of the liberal magazines for which Victor Reuther was
writing. Victor Reuther was travelling in Europe for the United
Automobile Workers and Ross educated himself. He knew more about what
was going on in the Italian elections, for instance, than most Americans
ever bothered to keep up with. He was never ostentatious about that, but
if you talked with him, you knew how well informed he was. And he was

Page 50

the superintendent of a Baptist Sunday School.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Would you say that his type is characteristic of the labor leaders in
Fort Worth today?

MARGARET CARTER:

No.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

What has happened there?

MARGARET CARTER:

I don't want to say anything bitter about the leadership of organized
labor. It has no leadership. There are only opportunists looking for a
way up into the middle class. They don't understand that it is an honor
to be a member of labor.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Would you explain this to some extent in terms of the story that you just
gave here, the way that the labor leaders of an earlier period were
weeded out?

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, it would be easier, I think, to tell you another story. [Laughter] When Paul Gray was the chairman of
our coalition, he became the chairman after Ross left, by that time, the
UAW had pulled out of the AFL-CIO and it had more money in its
citizenship fund for coalition activity than any other AFL-CIO union or
all of them lumped together. Paul was with CWA, which of course, is a
small union in terms of numbers, and we needed someone from labor to be
taken out of the plant, to serve full-time as an organizer before the
big convention. I believe that this was '56, the second Stevenson
campaign and the UAW got to nominate the person because they had the
most money to add to the fund and they nominated an old boy who was a
graduate of Texas A&M. They thought that was great because most
of them had never been to college at all, you know. He meant well, but
he couldn't help but be impressed by well-heeled Johnson supporters.
That was the year that Lyndon Johnson was trying to impress the national
convention with his ability to bring

Page 51

to the
national convention a delegation which would stay hitched. The reason
that Mr. Rayburn never had a chance to be nominated on a national ticket
was that from 1940 on, and I believe for a long time before that, back
in 1924, there was never a time from 1924 until 1956 that a Texas
delegation to the Democratic national convention supported in the
convention the candidate whom the majority of Texas voters supported the
following November. The Texas delegation was atypical and had neither
the will nor the strength to deliver the Texas vote in a general
election. Of course, in the forties, they had been impudent about it and
insulting. I believe that it was in '40 when they walked out of the
national convention.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Was this so even during the '30s, during the Roosevelt years?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. It was so from the time when Al Smith was nominated in '28 at the
Houston national convention. The Texas delegation did not support Al
Smith. Most of them bolted to Hoover. So, there never was a time after
Cox was the national nominee, until Lyndon Johnson put together the '56
delegation, that the delegation could say to be typical of Texas voters.
That was a source of constant embarassment to Mr. Rayburn. Well, he
advised Lyndon, "For God's sake, before you make your bid, get a
delegation together that will impress delegations from other states with
its loyalty to the national party." So, Lyndon put the organization for
the '56 delegation in our hands and he directed John Connally and
Raymond Buck and Hunter McLean to work with us.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Who is Hunter McLean?

MARGARET CARTER:

Hunter McLean is a member of one of the oldest families in Fort Worth.
That picture that I was showing you, from the suffrage scrapbook, of the
lady with the Scotch tartan around her shoulders? That's a picture of
his Aunt Margaret,

Page 52

who was an enthusiastic
Stevenson supporter both times and who lost a good many of her
influential friends because of her outspoken support of Stevenson.
Hunter owned an insurance company, which he had built by writing into
the fine print exceptions which made it most difficult to get his
company to pay out any of the income which he took in. [Laughter] He was the son of a very useful and
very loyal Democrat, who was also a medical doctor and was an industrial
surgeon whom working people trusted more in our county than anyone else.
Other members of his family had been the first lawyers and judges in the
county. The Scotts and the McLeans had a kind of a monopoly on the
professions in early Fort Worth.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, Hunter McLean was a conservative who usually would not be expected
to work in the Stevenson campaign?

MARGARET CARTER:

No. He was the kind of conservative who would have worked for Lyndon
Johnson out of opportunism. Those three were the conservative but loyal
leaders who helped the rest of us carry the conventions in '56. I was a
delegate to the national convention in '56, because Mr. Buck said that
the person who does the work ought to go to the convention.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Did you get to know John Connally personally in this role?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, I got to know John Connally and found out what a double-crossing
so-and-so he was and I have never had the slightest occasion to change
my opinion. We were talking about the labor leader and I told you that I
would tell you a story about that. Well, he was in charge of the office
that labor set up to help with this coalition effort and he couldn't
help but be impressed with the people from the Fort Worth Club who were
involved with us. Hunter was a gentleman, I'll

Page 53

give
him credit. He was elected to the board of our labor-liberal
organization. He accepted election to the board and he attended meetings
and took part. Now, John never let himself get caught in the same room
with us, but once. There was one point where we threatened to back out
of the whole thing and he did allow himself to sit in the same room with
us for a few minutes while Raymond Buck and Ross Mathews worked out the
situation. [Laughter] But Hunter was a
gentleman, he did work along with us, and this kid, whose name I can't
recall at the moment, I'll think of it, was bowled over at the
opportunity to play golf with Hunter McLean and they pegged him as the
person whom they could persuade to accept their guidance rather than the
guidance of impecunious liberals who had put him in a position to meet
them in the first place. And that poor boy got so mixed up and so torn
between the various loyalties that were fighting for him inside, that by
the time Connally's inauguration was being held—Connally went
after the governorship, of course, after this '56
campaign—and he was expecting a good appointment which we now
think that Connally never intended to make, but he thought that he had a
serious offer and he couldn't decide whether he wanted to do that or
stay in the labor movement. He dropped dead, and he wasn't forty years
old, at Connally's inauguration.

He was typical of the kind of labor leaders that we have had since then.
The lure of associating with executives is too much for them, especially
as they get into positions where they have got to maneuver so as to
satisfy conservative people or go back into the plant. Most of them
aren't like Ross. They don't think that they could make a living with
the skill they used to use to make a living. They can't bear the thought
of becoming blue collar workers if they have had a white

Page 54

collar job. They have no intention of doing as volunteers,
anything for which they have ever managed to draw pay and of course, we
don't have job patronage, or contract patronage, or campaign
headquarters financing to offer. They say, "Well, we provide the money
and you liberals get the credit." Well, of course, they have provided a
good deal of money, but they are mistaken about the liberals getting the
credit. They provide the money but we do the work, because when their
members see that they get the money, their members expect not to be
called upon to do work. The situation is now impossible, in my opinion.
It doesn't make any difference which personality is head of the state
AFL-CIO. If he gets to be head of the state AFL-CIO, he is already
committed to do nothing that will offend the governor, because they
think that it is more important to be able to submit a few names for a
few appointive positions to the governor than it is to keep their
membership informed about who is gutting whom for what.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

When do you think this first began to be the dominant view?

MARGARET CARTER:

I'm not sure that it was at the same time in all parts of the country.
I'm sure that it was not the same time in all the labor unions.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Say so far as the Texas AFL-CIO was concerned?

MARGARET CARTER:

I can't say. Until the merger, we worked more with the industrial unions
than with the craft unions.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And that was when, 1956?

MARGARET CARTER:

No, surely it's been farther back than that. There were Jerry Holleman
and Hank Brown and Roy Evans and Harry Hubbard, they've all presidents
since the merger . . . I'm not sure exactly when it was, but I know back
in the '40s and early '50s when we first became

Page 55

active, the state secretaries of the Industrial Union Council, I believe
they called it, they didn't even call it the state CIO for some time,
and the one of those that we got to know best was Jeff Hickman who was
an oil worker. Jeff had also been a schoolteacher and he was great.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

So, you see this gradual change in the labor movement as being really due
to structural features, which are pretty much endemic in the system?

MARGARET CARTER:

I think so. I think that it is a tragedy.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Do you see the labor movement as gradually splitting off from the liberal
movement?

MARGARET CARTER:

Not gradually . . . well, I guess that it has happened gradually, but it
has happened. The unions have been co-opted.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

And this again, would you say, really began to become evident in the
middle '50s?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, the 1956 election was also the election where finally the liberals
did come to blows with Lyndon Johnson, with Mrs. Frankie Randolph
leading them.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes. Well, we didn't exactly come to blows until we got to the
convention. Mr. Rayburn and Lyndon were so high-handed, they were
utterly out of touch with the realities of the situation. You know, we
had two members of the national committee to elect, and they thought
that Mr. Rayburn was going to hand-pick one and Mr. Johnson was going to
hand-pick the other. Mr. Rayburn was a man of his word. Now, back in the
'40s, when we had been willing to present contests which we had a good
chance to lose, Byron Skelton from Temple had been willing to be our
candidate for

Page 56

national committeeman, knowing very
well that Mr. Rayburn probably couldn't get the job for him and Byron
was a proud man who didn't especially like to be a losing candidate. Mr.
Rayburn had promised Byron in the middle '40s—I believe that was '48,
anyway, when Byron was the spearhead for an unsuccessful contest which
Mr. Rayburn wanted to carry to the national convention—that since Byron
didn't get to be national committeeman then, the first time that loyal
Democrats could elect a national committeeman, Mr. Rayburn would support
Byron Skelton. Well, he remembered that and he didn't have the slightest
intention of ever crossing Byron Skelton, and he said to Lyndon, "Byron
Skelton is going to be the national committeeman. Now, you can pick the
national committeewoman." Neither one of them ever thought to consult
the people who had done the work that gave them the chance to have any
input, about what we wanted. So, we went to the convention pledged to
Mrs. Randolph and we elected her on the floor. You probably know as much
about that as I do.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Well, why don't you just tell it.

MARGARET CARTER:

Well, Lyndon and Mr. Rayburn, of course, were able to handpick the
committees and the officers of the convention because there were no
state party rules until 1972. And the nominations committee kept trying
to bring in a winning team. [unclear] By
that time, Kathleen Voight from San Antonio had also become a well-known
organizer and was very close to Mr. Rayburn.

John Connally was trying to get to be the national committeeman and that
was probably why he tolerated us in his district at all. He had agreed
to work with Raymond and Hunter in keeping us in line to do the work, in
the district. He wanted to be the national committeeman. I had suggested
that

Page 57

we support Mrs. Randolph for national
committeewoman and Mr. Buck for national committeeman. Mr. Buck had
wanted to be national committeeman all his life and the national
committeeman has to raise a good deal of money and I saw no reason why
we couldn't deal with an honest conservative. The Fort Worth liberals
refused to help Mr. Rayburn keep his commitment to Byron Skelton because
in the course of their interfactional squabbling, Byron Skelton had
helped Mr. Rayburn to cut Creekmore Fath's throat.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Creekmore Fath being an Austin liberal?

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes, and many of us were and still are friends of Creekmore's. So, we
didn't feel any obligation to help Mr. Rayburn get the committeeman's
seat for Byron. He hadn't been of any effective help to us in some time.
We supported Raymond Buck for national committeeman and I had gotten to
know Mrs. Randolph rather well by that time.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Mrs. Randolph being a rather wealthy Houston liberal and publisher of the
Texas Observer, the liberal weekly.

MARGARET CARTER:

Yes and of course, the founder of the Harris County Democrats.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Yes, the liberal organization in Houston.

MARGARET CARTER:

I proposed to Mrs. Randolph that Houston and Fort Worth join forces and
support Buck and Randolph as a team. She said, "I don't know Raymond
Buck." [Laughter] She said, "Of course, you
may address the Harris County caucus." So, Mr. Buck found out that he
wasn't going to get any liberal support and he knew that he wasn't going
to get any conservative support, so he didn't run. [Laughter] They made him the temporary chairman of the state
convention then. That was all right, too, because he was fair. When we
got to the convention on Sunday, the convention was

Page 58

due to start on Tuesday morning and we went up on Sunday afternoon,
having made all our local caucus decisions Sunday afternoon, then a few
of us went immediately to Dallas to find out what was going on. The
first thing that I had to deal with was to go and tell Byron Skelton
that we weren't going to support him, because he thought we were. That
wasn't easy to do. But I found him and told him that I was sorry and
that he knew why and he said that he did. Then I looked around to see
where else I might get some information and on the way up the stairs, I
found out that Lyndon was pushing Mrs. Lloyd Bentsen for national
committeewoman. So, we got up to Ed Levy's suite, Ed Levy was the state
committeeman from Texarkana and my husband had served on the state
committee with him and he was a loyal, if not a very liberal, Democrat.
I knew some of the people and some I didn't and as soon as I came in,
they quit talking to each other. So, as soon as I got a drink in my
hand, I said, "Who is going to be the national committeewoman?" They
were sure that I was pledged to Frankie Randolph and so nobody would
rise to the bait and there was a long pause and somebody said, "Well,
who do you think it is going to be?" I said, "Well, I don't know, but it
sure isn't going to be Lloyd Bentsen." [Laughter] Poor old Ed realized that there was tension in his
party, so he came wandering over with about his fifth drink in his hand
and he said, "Lloyd Bentsen can't be the national committeewoman, he's a
man." [Laughter] That was the feminist point
that we tried to make during a good part of that convention, that
whichever woman became the national committeewoman should be someone who
had worked hard in the campaign, not someone whose husband was given the
committeewoman's seat as a consolation prize.

[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

Page 59

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

You sometimes wonder if history would have been different?

MARGARET CARTER:

Had we allowed Mrs. Bentsen to have the committeewoman's seat in '56. She
got it later, about three presidential elections later, as I remember.
[Laughter] There was a big
pre-convention rally that night and when Lyndon Johnson came on the
platform to speak about something . . . I don't remember what . . . he
was booed, largely by Harris County people who were disappointed that he
had tried so hard to try to find some other candidate besides Mrs.
Randolph for national committeewoman. We discovered his weakness. Up to
that point, he hadn't been willing to negotiate with us, but he could
not bear the thought of being booed and he came to terms with us. The
agreement was that Mrs. Randolph would get a chance, not that he would
support her, but that she would get a fair chance to recruit as much
support as she could, support on the floor of the convention, which was
necessary when you had no rules and you had to have an agreement with
whoever was in charge of the platform if we would guarantee that he
would not be booed anytime during the convention.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That's the deal he made?

MARGARET CARTER:

We had great difficulty carrying out our part of the bargain. [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

That's a very potent power to wield.

MARGARET CARTER:

And still, he would not allow the committee on nominations to consider
her name. He tried to get the wife of a doctor from Lake Whitney
considered and he tried to get Kathleen Voight considered but Kathleen
was so close to Mr. Rayburn that Mr. Rayburn would have had to accept
Kathleen as his half of the bill, John Connally was going to be the
other one. Well, John Connally didn't have the support of his
district—our district. But they almost put that past us and
it was Mr. Buck who tipped me off that they were about to put that past
us. So, we rushed up and quickly transferred

Page 60

our
support from Mr. Buck, who had not formally told us that he would not
accept the nomination, to Mr. Skelton and that, among other things,
locked Mr. Rayburn into his choice of Mr. Skelton and it knocked
Kathleen out of her chance to be considered in competition with Mrs.
Randolph. Then, the nominating committee still didn't have a candidate
to suggest with Mr. Skelton. They recommended Mr. Skelton for
committeeman and they made no recommendation for committeewoman. Then we
got a vote on the floor on Mrs. Randolph for committeewoman. Before the
convention proceedings got that far, we had some contests decided
because Hunter's and John's and Raymond's friends who had joined them in
working with us had filed a contest against our delegation. At that
stage in the development of convention politics in Texas, it wasn't
usual to get contests settled early enough in the convention for the
decision to mean very much. We got the contests settled before we took
the crucial vote and Mrs. Randolph was elected from the floor. Of
course, she worked very well with Paul Butler who became the national
chairman. And when Paul Butler was setting up this executive committee
of the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Rayburn and Mr. Johnson didn't
want it set up at all, whoever made the motion for Butler's proposal in
the national commitee was seconded by Mrs. Randolph. You know, she had a
deep voice, she sounded like a man when she spoke and some reporter, who
was new to all this, went scurrying around in the room where the
National Committee met to find Frankie Randolph. Well, for one thing,
she turned out to be a woman and for another, she turned out to be from
Texas. He said to Mrs. Randolph, "Did you know that Lyndon Johnson would
be displeased with your having seconded that motion?" She said, "Young
man, Lyndon Johnson was displeased with my having a seat on this
committee." [Laughter]

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

As indeed he was.

Page 61

MARGARET CARTER:

I'm getting tired, now.

CHANDLER DAVIDSON:

Fine. This is the end of the interview with Mrs. Margaret Carter of Fort
Worth, by Chandler Davidson.

END OF INTERVIEW

1. For the United States Senate.

2. William A. Blakley. Blakley had been
appointed to the Senate in 1957 to fill the unexpired term of Price
Daniel, who resigned to become governor, and in 1960 to succeed Lyndon
B. Johnson, who ascended to the vice presidency. In the special election
in 1961, Blakley led a field of seventy-one candidates, running without
party designation. The runner-up was Tower. In the 1961 runoff, Tower
won the Senate seat. Blakley had opposed Yarborough in the Democratic
primary of 1958 and been defeated by Yarborough. Blakely had, therefore,
been denied the Democratic nomination on the only occasion when
Democratic voters had had a chance to express a preference.

3. The former New Deal congressman from San
Antonio.

4. Mrs. Carter is here referring to a scrapbook
that she had shown to Dr. Davidson prior to the interview containing an
account of the women's suffrage movement in Fort Worth in 1917 through
1920.

5. The RFC was organized during Hoover's
administration.

6. A Houston labor attorney who later served in
the Texas House of Representatives and the United States Congress.

7. Long, an Austin newspaperman, and his wife,
Emma, have long been associated with the liberal movement.

8. Houston labor lawyer and statewide liberal
strategist.

9. An Austin attorney, former congressman, and
political fundraiser for such conservative candidates as U.S. Senator
Lloyd Bentsen and Governor Dolph Briscoe.

10. Mrs. Cunningham was a leading liberal
figure in Texas for many years. She was a woman suffragist leader in the
teens, a staunch Progressive and Prohibitionist, and a New Deal
Democrat. She ran unsuccessfully for governor in the 1944 Democratic
primary.

Fear on Trial

12. Former governor of Texas, and the
unsuccessful opponent of Lyndon Johnson in the 1948 Democratic primary
race for a U.S. Senate seat.